We knew the revolution wouldn’t be televised, but many of us really hoped it might be on the Internet. Now we know these hopes were false. There was no Internet Revolution and there will be no Internet Revolution. We will stumble on in more or less exactly the way we did before massive computer networks infiltrated our daily lives.
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But what exactly is new here? Not very much. Email is still mail. Online newspapers are still newspapers. YouTube videos are still videos. Virtual stores are still stores. MMORPGs are still variations on D&D. A user-built encyclopedia is still a reference book. Stealing mp3s is still theft. Cyber-porn is still porn. Internet poker is still gambling. In terms of content, the Internet gives us almost nothing that the much maligned “traditional media” did not.
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The media experts, however, tell us that there really is something new and transformative about the Internet. It goes under various names, but it amounts to “collaboration.” The Internet makes it much easier for people to do things together ... Collaboration abounds online. That’s a fair point. But “easier” is not new or transformative. There is nothing new about any of the activities that take place on the aforementioned sites. We did them all in the Old World of Old Media.
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Just why we would think that a new medium like the Internet would “change everything” is a bit of a mystery, but it probably has to do with the lingering influence of Marshall McLuhan. The sage of Toronto famously taught that “the medium is the message,” which is to say that media technologies themselves are powerful agents of social change. It’s a nice slogan, but it’s not really true.
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In the end, the message is the message, and the message transmitted over virtually all modern media, the Internet included, is this: buy something.
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